12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jay Ritchie

Jay Ritchie is the author of Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books, 2017) and is currently pursuing an MFA at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Follow him on Twitter @jaywritchie.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My most recent work feels different in that I can look at it and not want to set it on fire. It's been a couple weeks since I've seen it in print and I'm still glowing, so that's positive.

My first book didn't change my life, but learning that small presses and literary magazines existed did. I didn't know someone could just be "a writer" and pursue that exclusively, or that and its affiliated jobs (teaching, editing, publishing)–I thought all writing was done in secret before and after a day job, in the middle of the night or before the sun came up.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I probably came to poetry sideways, through a fourth dimension. So there was no "first," there were just books and what I found in them. I've been writing poetry next to fiction and non-fiction since I started writing in earnest.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Copious notes and scraps, false starts for novels, diary entries, it all goes into the poetry grinder. Occasionally I'll write something "first try" that sticks, and I'll usually build around that until I get another good first try. I like to believe those successful first tries are little gifts from another place/mind, something that should be treated with respect.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I find it very intimidating to work on a "book" so I engage in fun game of self-deception where I work on individual pieces, pretending I'm not trying to put them into manuscript format at a later date. It helps me focus on small details without being dwarfed by the presence of a larger project.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings. Sometimes you're in a community centre with fluorescent lighting and children's dance studio above you and an adjacent washroom with a supersonic toilet flush mechanism, and those are less fun, but overall, I seize the opportunity to make something happen. Readings aren't part of my creative process, but they definitely help speed the process along.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Artists and writers can sometimes give the impression that they are outside of reality, or even worse, above it, and I think that's a bad attitude. I'm concerned with how artists and writers interact with their moment in time, how their preoccupations manifest in literature. Is that theory?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the role of the writer is to articulate an insight that requires a great deal of time to reach. One variable writing seems to deal with more than other art forms, overall, is time. Writing a book takes time. If that book is giving you the same response as as TV show, why read it?

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Do this! Do that! Too short! Too fat! I like an editor who's in your corner as a friend that is equally committed to your work. Someone to bounce ideas and iterations off of.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"Literary problems have literary solutions." David McGimpsey told my poetry workshop and probably many others that little tidbit. Basically, I took it as, it's not your lifestyle/personality/whatever that is holding back your writing–it's technical. Dive into the work, break it apart, analyze it. It has helped me feel less shitty about myself and work with more focus.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It's been extremely difficult to move between genres. I would love to write a short story soon.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I love routines. I wish I could keep one. I haven't had a typical day for months, so I can't really say. I try to write every morning, even if only for 30 minutes. I do a lot of garbage writing then sift through it like a magpie for gems. My routine also involves a lot of changing my routine as soon as it gets settled. If I'm writing in the morning and it's going really well I'll usually sabotage it and start writing at night, just to see if it's different.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other writers, usually. I just dive into a book. I also go for walks and try not to think anything at all.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My family had this cedar chest that held phone books, and whenever I opened it the smell would woosh out. So, cedar.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I almost always listen to music while I write, so I suppose that's the most accurate answer. Though of course everything is an influence, it all leaves an impression.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Cecilia Pavón's poem "Billet Doux."

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Watch The Sopranos.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I love physics, I think it would be fascinating to understand them.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
At the end of all the hangovers, heartbreaks, mistakes, self-hating, and sadness is a book. I wanted to write one.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Giovanni's Room reminded me of what books are for, what they can do. I read that for the first time this year, after continuously being recommended it. And I recently saw this film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes that was really moving. Poetic, political, understated; a lot of the visuals have stayed with me.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Fitting different forms into the same long poem.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;
 

some sale books! I've an excess of copies,

some sale books: For the sake of attempting extra space in our wee house, I'm offering for a limited time only a couple of my trade books for sale: POETRY TITLES: wild horses, $10 (University of Alberta Press, 2010); The Ottawa City Project, $10 (Chaudiere Books, 2007); red earth, $8 (Black Moss Press, 2003); FICTION TITLES: The Uncertainty Principle: stories, $10 (Chaudiere Books, 2014); missing persons, $10 (The Mercury Press, 2009); white, $10 (The Mercury Press: 2007). Add $2 for Canadian shipping, or $5 for US. If anything appeals, shoot me an email (or paypal + e-transfar) at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail (dot) com

Cecily Nicholson, Wayside Sang

intimate feel of brakes

used too much

squeal worn insensitive

unresponsive

indicators or indications

trauma takes more time

bodies through climates

rolling stone

sharp shoulders

ponding forms potholes

leaching

rainbows of oil solvents

in washouts

burnt sunforged visions

coal

a mountaintop removed

caravan

saharan highway to the sea (“Port of Entry”)

Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson’s third collection with Talonbooks – after Triage (2011) and From the Poplars (2014) [see my review of such here] – is Wayside Sang (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017), a collection of six extended lyric sequences/suites with an accompanying “Afterword,” where she writes:

For Wayside Sang I set out to place myself in relation to my birth father’s history. A favourite bit of information that I have about him was that he was a travelling musician. It was in thinking on day jobs, however, and the static demands for artists called out on the road, that led me to study the automobile, its industry, roadways, and hospitality, through and beyond the region all my fathers have travelled. In concert I activated childhood memories of rural car exchange, gearhead brothers, mosport park camping, and so many escapes out on the road, on foot, as a passenger, and as a driver. These tracks I thought would give way to further study, to consider entwined migrations of black-other diaspora, to locate more of my african descent at this late stage, unmoored and mitigated as it may be. Where I cannot locate my bloodlines, I would honour others’ accounts. It seems obvious now that the scope of what I set out to do was in some ways far-reaching.

                       

Nicholson’s work has long been engaged in the book length poem/suite, but there is something about this new collection that holds itself together as a complex breath, constructed as a single, ongoing line. As she suggests in her “Afterword,” Wayside Sang is an exploration through geographic, historical and cultural space, attempting to discern something of her birth father, something the book’s press release reaffirms: “This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across the Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath rivers, between nation states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders, in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region.” Hers is both a real and imagined space of a lost parent, moving between the archive and the spaces he occupied, writing out automobile production, border crossings and the fossil fuel industry, writing: “low crude prices continue to take their toll / and we continue to live […]” (“Fossil Fuel Psyche”). As much as anything, Wayside Sang is a book of origins, as Nicholson attempts to hear those songs from the side of the road, exploring and critiquing the multiple facets of that space from which she emerged.

Through Wayside Sang, Nicholson composes her own songs to the wayside, and the music of her lines is unmistakable, writing “underground resistance / takes the front stoop // got a car, so is grown // summer now falling away / late pedal steel gives an ambient hum” (“Songs Alongside”). Or further, in the section/suite “Daughter, Imagine Her,” that includes:

here because I’m here on a thread

I hear threads backed up to a wall of sound

with wheels

and this little room

to breathe in is driving the exhales

thrust to gallery

discourses

of era law policy papers acts

pains absent in

liberatory TV on the Radio

                            smoke

watch them fall                               them all an intellect

            of collisions well-anticipated

an autumn post: some recent adventuring,

I feel like I'm very far behind in our adventure-posts the past few months. I am but a flurry of writing and children and errands and children and making.

We've done a number of exciting things lately, including apple picking at an orchard south of Ottawa, where the girls ran around wearing matching jean jackets, and Christine became frustrated at my efficiency (apparently I "missed the point" of apple picking), gathering fifty pounds of apples in less than fifteen minutes. Given we were not that far from the homestead, I suggested: why not take some to my father?

We ended up on the farm, where we had a good visit with my father. When my sister caught wind we were there, she invited us all over for dinner (we also left her a bag of apples).

Which means: the children and I spent the next two weeks baking. Most of what we made have been apple breads, but I also managed two strudels and two batches of applesauce, as well as an apple cake for the sake of Aoife's half-birthday (she turned eighteen months on October 16). Rose has become quite capable at helping with the stirring. Given Aoife also wishes to be involved, I've taken to giving her a pot to simply bang upon, which appeases her so far (I suspect this will not last long).

This is what Aoife looked like the day she turned eighteen months.

We also went to a pumpkin patch, where the girls ran around some more, and picked out a pumpkin they could agree upon (finally). At Rose's insistence, we went through a corn-maze, which neither Aoife nor I were impressed with.

Otherwise, both children enjoyed the day. There was a bouncy area that Rose spent far too much time on, and Aoife and I wandered the other play structures, including a pirate ship.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with David White

David White is one of the poets of Renga: A Collaborative Poem (Brick Books). In 1994, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario with the dissertation, “A Territory Not Yet On The Map:” Relocating Gay Aestheticism In The Age of AIDS. He is a professor of Theatre History and Writing at Fanshawe College and lives in London, Ontario. The Lark Ascending is his first (solo) collection poetry, published by Pedlar Press (2017).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Publishing your first book at the age of 62 doesn’t really change all that much. Putting The Lark Ascending together was in part sorting through manuscripts. There’s still a lot to sort through going back to the 1980s. But the one thing that happened when I sent The Lark off, even before the offer of publication, was I set out on a completely different project. I wrote pieces about LGBTQ composers, musicians, performers based on recordings. People like Tyckowsky, Noel Coward, Aaron Copeland, Samuel Barber, Billy Strayhorn. I’d listen to the recordings while writing the piece, letting the music inform the work. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Actually it’s more of a return to poetry. Doesn’t everyone start with poetry in adolescence? After I finished my Ph.D. dissertation in 1994, I worked on fiction, short stories and novels. But when I moved in with Judy and Shen (the subject of The Lark Ascending) I didn’t have any time for that. I started writing a poem here and there. Over the course of 20 years they accumulated into the book.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

There’s no one way. Sometimes things come quite quickly, and sometimes I’ve waited decades for the right word to come along.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

With The Lark Ascending, I knew when we went to China and started writing about the trip that it was a book, and I’d be writing it as I lived it. Now, while there may be projects, I’m gradually assembling things together, things written before, during, and after the writing of The Lark.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy readings, but my first degree was in Theatre, and I teach Theatre History. I think of a reading as a performance  and I try not to spend too much time explaining things and aim towards a certain emotional impact.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Obviously, as a Gay man, LGBTQ issues are of concern to me. When I first began writing in the late 1970s, I did think I could or would be allowed to write about my experience. What I wrote was fairly difficult; a friend at the time said it seemed as if I didn’t care if anyone was listening. There were love poems that used the wrong pronoun. When I finally got around to changing the pronouns, they were much better poems.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Being a true witness of/to your times.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

So far my experience has been working with Stan Dragland as an editor! So that experience was essential not in the least difficult. Nobody’s going to read your book more closely or carefully. It’s a wonderful dialogue.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Rilke’s advice in Letters to a Young Poet: write what you know.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaboration to academic writing)? What do you see as the appeal?

Don’t do much academic writing now. I’ve pretty much dabbled in everything. Poetry feels like home now.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

No routine to speak of.  Even with teaching, the schedule is varied and changes every 14 weeks. Poems come when they come and when you can find the time.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Learn something new, research; that’s where the inspiration comes from

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Baking bread, and Lilly of the Valley.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music and the visual arts. I’ll often choose a specific piece of music to listen to and write about; that happens a couple of times in The Lark Ascending, not just in the title piece.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I have to make a choice?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Publish a second book.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Maybe an actor.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I couldn’t do anything else.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Madeline Thien‘s Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Moonlight.

20 - What are you currently working on?

One of the things I’ve started is a sequence of poems I’m calling Apologies (as in with apologies to…). Individual poems that recall, allude to, rewrite other poems. So far I’ve some based on Catullus, Cavafy, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, R.E.M.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : f o u r _ r e c e n t _ e s s a y s

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers, created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, our site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

We've now more than thirty essays posted! Our most recent include:

Michele Leavitt on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane and Emily Brontë’s Catherine

Christine Fischer Guy on Alice Munro and Jan Morris

Dominique Russell on Sylvia Plath

Kim Fahner on Gwendolyn MacEwen

Please check out our submissions page for more information (we are seeking submissions! we even pay a small amount!). We've also a Facebook page!

We are also still accepting signed books for our upcoming fundraiser! and check out our Patreon page! All donations go directly to paying contributors.

Thanksgiving: some Sainte-Adèle,

Given I'm behind on everything these days, I'm only now getting to my Thanksgiving post, having spent a couple of days at mother-in-law's cottage over part of the long weekend. The young ladies ran around, as they do, with their cousins, and Christine and I even managed to breathe, just a bit. I made a strudel. Aoife and I did a brief grocery errand in town, which she enjoyed. All in all, it was warm, and quiet. We sat in the sun.

 

Ongoing notes: late(r) October, 2017

It occurs to me that I haven’t done one of these in a while, and the incoming chapbooks are beginning to pile up.

And don’t forget about the upcoming fall edition of the ottawa small press book fair! I’ll also be manning a table of above/ground press items at Meet thePresses in Toronto in a couple of weeks. Might I see you at either of these?

And congratulations again to this year’s shortlist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award! Thrilled to see above/ground press titles by Renée Sarojini Saklikar and Dana Claxton getting further attention.

Toronto ON: American poet, critic, editor and publisher Dale Smith’s first Canadian publication (he and partner Hoa Nguyen relocated from Texas to Toronto with their two boys in 2011) is the chapbook Sons (Knife Fork Book, 2017), a sequence of intimate and untitled fragments that focus on the immediacy of parenting:

Spiny lizard on yucca

Bury spade in clay

Scoop it watch him

Scrape with plastic toy

The ground gives

Slowly

Loosen its roots

With water

Pat warm dirt and mulch

Hello Tree

Hello Tree

Hello Tree

Composed out of hesitations, breath and an attention to the most elusive of moments, Smith writes out a sequence of meditative fragments include the awareness of being attentive to the requirements of and anxieties around fathering two boys: “Show them / A man / What that could be [.]” There is such a care carved into these short lines and phrases, one created out of such intimacy, deep love and attention, with neither a word nor sentiment not set exactly how and where they should be.

Will there be fish to eat

One day

Breaking flesh

To feast

With a lightness

And assurance

Will our children

Have enough

An ancient question

And terror of not

Living up to what

The many tides of people

In us have made

Grand Rapids MI/Athens GA: From Georgia poet Jake Syersak comes the new chapbook NEOCOLOGISM: A TRIO OF ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRIES FOR TREADING THE ANTHROPO-SCENIC PSYCHE (2017), produced through Michael Sikkema’s Shirt Pocket Press. In case you haven’t noticed, Syersak has been releasing a flurry of chapbooks lately (including one with above/ground press), and there is an enormous amount going on in this new work of accumulated fragments, prose sections and lyric aggregations that evolve into a particular kind of essay-poem. I find Syersak’s chapbooks-to-date absolutely fascinating, and he’s clearly working with longer forms than the chapbook-length work, which make me curious to see what his eventual full-length collections will look like.

You told me that the NY Times says The Apple Corporation is using Picasso’s le Taureau (an 11-lithograph sequence showing the evolution of a bull’s being built in the cubist mode) to exemplify, in some way or another, how business trends toward the ergonomic, simplistic, are not only inevitable but high-brow, academically-sound. Endearing, somewhat, I thought, but I couldn’t help but ask, evolution’s a ha-ha eyeing its beholder when you own the rights prescribing it, right? You told me, “you can unwind oblivion or a sketchist’s wrist only in so far as the m-dash of its original animal ache.” & unwinding the voilà of a rose reveals?—“what the rose is: voilà, revolting.”

________

sometimes you turn into

this thing

you can’t believe

until belief bends

into a becoming thing.

I sleep next to this laundry

because I hate to hang old phantoms.

Ina recent interview posted at Ghost Proposal, while discussing the forthcoming chapbook Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick, which they also published, Syersak responds:

I blame the LANGUAGE poets for creating the mentality that poetry is somehow nothing more than a “game” to be played. There are too many life / death ramifications evident in language pervading our culture to think like that. Looking back, I actually think now that this book (what’s now the last section to a larger collection called Yield Architecture) was my attempt to purge the influence of LANGUAGE poetry from my own poetics. My poems will always be haunted by their influence, but I hope it endures as some centrifuge of sabotage, maybe through the formless material you cite that manifests through sensation.